Some trailblazing negotiations Friday have improved the prospects for
protecting a public treasure in southern Dallas.

Last month, a nonprofit group wanted to build a horse-riding path near a
freshwater spring. The city was preparing to erect a fence to protect it from
horses.

But those plans have changed.

Advocates for what’s called the Big Spring have pressed the city to leave the
tree-rimmed historic site and its natural surroundings alone.

They presented their case to the city staff in late July and continued their
discussions Friday morning during a tour of the area.

After tromping through a recently mowed meadow near the spring, the group
apparently reached a consensus to keep the horse trail away from the water,
eliminating the need for a fence.

“This is it. It’s a compromise. This works for me,” said Ted Barker, an East
Dallas resident who had been calling for keeping the trail outside the spring’s
meadow.

He then planted a wooden marker for a hitching post beneath a pecan tree in
the meadow. It was the morning’s third such stop, the farthest yet from the
spring.

Not everyone agreed.

“Let’s see a show of hands that are agin it,” archaeologist Tim Dalbey told
the 30 people before he and three others did just that. They still wanted the
trail built beyond the meadow, where hundreds of acres in the Great Trinity
Forest are available for such use.

“I guess everybody else is for it, so I don’t want to hear any
[complaining],” said Dalbey, who has worked to protect the Trinity corridor for
years. “Everybody can ride their horses up to the spring.”

“No, no. I’ll control that. You have my word,” said Wayne Kirk, board
president of River Ranch Educational Charities, which will build and use the
trail.

River Ranch and Equest, a therapeutic riding center, will operate the Texas
Horse Park, scheduled to open next summer south of the spring at 811 Pemberton
Hill Road.

Kirk had proposed building the trail near the spring, but he talked
repeatedly Friday about protecting the site. Yet he insisted on keeping part of
the trail in the meadow, saying that otherwise the trail would run too close to
electricity transmission lines.

“We want to stay as far away from them as we can,” he said, not mentioning
that such lines run near the horse park site itself and elsewhere in the Trinity
forest. “Think about the people coming from all over and the first thing they
see when they are riding is power lines. That doesn’t promote Dallas and Texas
very well.”

Dalbey, Eric Reed and others rejected that argument.

“They wanted a foothold inside here,” Reed, an attorney, said of the meadow,
which he wants protected. “So now they can come back and say it’s not a
conservancy and do whatever they want to with it.”

Jill Jordan, assistant city manager, and Willis Winters, city park and
recreation director, have said there will be no construction north of an
electric utility easement near the spring.

Friday’s two-hour walk followed a proposed trail route that passed near the
spring, crossed a wet and rocky slough, and circled through woods and around a
field of spent wildflowers.

Some of the group looked at maps and talked about the area’s flooding, its
litter of tires, its wildlife.

“When we come out here in the spring, there are indigo buntings, painted
buntings. This place is loaded with migratory birds,” said wildlife biologist
Becky Rader, mentioning the area’s beaver, river otter and mink. “We have to
think about the wildlife being impacted by trails out here.”

The horse trail will have a limited presence in the spring meadow, according
to the final discussions Friday. It will be discussed at another meeting of the
spring advocates and city staff, Jordan said. But, she said, “the rough path has
been established.”

Also on the agenda, she said, will be an initiative to establish a city
landmark for the area, which has evidence of a prehistoric American Indian
presence, was home to Dallas-area settlers and supposedly was a campsite for Sam
Houston in 1843.

Yet to be resolved is the matter of pedestrian access to the publicly owned
spring.

“The desire is for the public to have access to the spring, but we don’t want
it to be willy-nilly access,” Jordan told the group Friday. “We don’t want it to
be overrun and damaged. It needs to be done in a thoughtful and controlled
manner.”